ATI 5850 Crossfire & Video Card Fan Speeds

[Kitfox]

I noticed today that I can manually adjust the video card fan speeds in my catalyst control center. One of my cards usually stays at 70 degrees while the other some where above 50 degrees. The fan speeds were set automatically by the catalyst drivers for both cards to about 30%. I decided to manually adjust the speed to 75% and my cards got almost 20 degrees cooler (49 degrees for the first card and 35 degrees for the second). Amazing! While playing Skyrim my main card would often hit 90 degrees (on full ultra settings) which bothered me quite a bit.

But I worry now. Will this have any negative repercussion? Will the fans break down being both set to 75 % speed? Will my tampering run the risk of destroying my cards or the fans?

Help me HL2.net your my only hope.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

I can't speak for your specific brand or manufacturer, but I had my old BFG 7950gt programmed to change it's fan speed based on the core temperature. The card still works now almost 5 years later. I did the same for my CPU fan which was always at either 60 or 90% fan speed, still works now 8 years later. One thing to keep in mind though, I was using two programs (rivatuner for gpu and speedfan for cpu), and both on occasion liked to stop working randomly (in recent years), so you might want to keep your ear open, mine made distinct sounds at the higher speeds, and my bios was set to shutdown if my cpu went over a certain temp, and when the fan fell back to auto-20% in middle of an intensive game, the pc would shut down. But I got used to hearing that whirrrr and knew when to alt tab out and change the speed manually. I never found out why it randomly stops like that for either program (not stops, but goes to default speed, which is too low for that old computer).

 

[Kitfox]

Which now begs the question. Will overclocking both crossfired 5850 make a significant difference in performance on games like say skyrim. Which works fine on ultra setting (other than crashing randomly, some times getting purple textures, or entire npc polygons disappearing like peoples faces and arms).

Specifically if I try to run skyrim in eyefinity on ultra it is completely unplayable (high settings are choppy also but not as much).

Would overclocking create a significant difference?

 

[DEATHMASTER]

I do not overclock because I don't think it's worth the risk to the hardware, especially if you're already concerned about the heat.

 

[Kitfox]

Quick update!
I have ruined my cards.

 

[Ren.182]

What have you done? I've got the same cards and mine rarely go above 60/70 degrees on full load. A better case/air flow might have helped.

 

[Kitfox]

I played with the overdrive settings thinking that it wouldn't hurt (note I only changed the settings for a very brief period (5 minutes tops) while carefully following online instructions). I am now seeing random polygons appearing on models and pink spots on static textures even though i'm back to normal settings. I was able to resolve the issue by turning off crossfire and down-clocking the vram too 900 but after fiddling some more I ruined that too.